Here is a female academic writing about the difficulty of raising children as a feminist:

Here I am, an academic who studies feminism, motherhood, and families. I know about the glass ceiling, the maternal wall, and the second shift. I’ve read the studies on girls and self-esteem. I banished Disney princesses from my home when my children were small (to no avail, because they somehow figured out who they were anyway). I bought all the Goldie Blox toys, and there’s a Project Mc2 sitting on a shelf.

I’m sure this is a good, well-meaning person who’s horrified with the climate change and probably donates to ecological causes. But she does not even begin to attempt to decouple the obsessive need to consume from her political beliefs. A feminist, for her, is a person who makes certain consumer choices.

“I’m a feminist, and that means I buy ABC and don’t buy XYZ” is a belief that not only trivializes and destroys feminism (and, by the way, the author confesses that she fails at raising her kids in a feminist way) but also reaffirms the dangerous consumerist philosophy.

My goal is not to single out this specific person but to suggest that we all start questioning our need to reveal our identities to the world and ourselves through the act of buying. It’s hard for everybody because the very first thing that pops into one’s mind after we experience a strong emotion is, ” What can I buy now?” But it has to be done because we are both emptying all of our experiences of any meaning and damaging the environment beyond repair.

Wow, Trump is actually defending Putin from the charges of ordering the murder of Alexander Litvinenko:

Trump told Fox Business News in defense of Putin that: “They say a lot of things about me that are untrue too… First of all, he [Putin] says he didn’t do it. Many people say it wasn’t him. So who knows who did it? Have they found him guilty? I don’t think they’ve found him guilty. If he did it, fine but I don’t know that he did it… But in all fairness to Putin – and I’m not saying this because he says ‘Trump is brilliant and leading everybody’ – the fact is that he hasn’t been convicted of anything.”

That’s pretty deranged at this point. I thought that nobody but the most marginal folks with no access to any information at all were interested in defending Putin any longer.

There seems to be no reason for Trump’s willingness to die on Putin’s sword than the one Trump himself clumsily revealed*: Trump will lick the boots of anybody who praises him. And that’s not only pathetic but dangerous. Everybody has personal issues but when one’s psychological baggage becomes so heavy, one gets very dangerous to others.

*Whenever anybody says, “Please don’t think I’m XYZ”, you can safely assume they are very much XYZ and are dying to reveal it to you.

One of the prerequisites of Washington insiderism

is disdain for Hillary Clinton. Hating Hillary is an industry among the political class and media elites…

There’s much talk of populism in 2016, of establishment versus outsiders, of Trump and Bernie. But what’s more populist than a candidate beloved by the people and reviled by political tastemakers and media elites?

Yes, Hillary is the true outsider, and yes, that statement torpedoes conventional wisdom.

Everybody who is not blinded by sexism knows this. Of course, that’s not a huge group of people.

There is also a hilarious article in the NYTIMES about anti-Hillaryists:

“THERE is nothing more sexist than wanting Hillary Clinton as president because she’s a woman.”

That is the attack I faced, in December, from women on a cruise organized by The Nation, the stalwart liberal magazine.

This is so damn funny. An equivalent would be a stalwart liberal saying that Affirmative Action is “racist against white people.”

Poor facile freaks. All their fake liberalism flies out of the window the second they are asked to question the foundational support of their sad little psyche, i.e. the conviction that women suck.

Talking about pink elephants, here is a big one: an article on parenting that is actually not stupid!

Adam Grant “How to Raise a Creative Child.” Hugely recommended.

In the meanwhile, parents in Montréal camp out in the frigid Canadian night to register their kids for a prestigious kindergarten program. I’m guessing they are not reading Dr. Grant.

On the literal level, of course it isn’t. The very idea is bizarre.

There is a deeper meaning to the statement, though. Major global threats are no longer linked to any specific territory and, thus, constitute a deathly menace to the nation-state. There absolutely is an existential threat (and actually more than one) to our nation-state and all other nation-state. And ISIS is evidence of that threat.

The election cycle is highlighting differences but there is something we all share. Like blind people palpating an elephant, we are noticing different parts of the same phenomenon.

Look at Flint, for instance. First, capital fled, happy about its newfound mobility. The industrial lifestyle collapsed. Those who could imitate the capital’s mobility left. The rest were stuck in the degraded landscape of the post-industrial ruin.

As if all this weren’t bad enough, the nation-state decided to inscribe its abandonment of its duties not only on the landscape but on the actual bodies of the human beings it now considers surplus, unwanted, cumbersome.

Nobody declared a war, nobody invaded. But the people of Flint were destroyed just as methodically and surely as any enemy combatant ever could. The nation-state is no longer even pretending to fight these crucial battles for us. This is something that should bring us all together. But first we need to open our eyes and finally see the elephant.